Book Description
Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella.
Customer Reviews:
A great introduction to a litery giant.......2005-12-13
This is my first time reading Thomas Mann, save for the few excerpts that appear in college literature studies. Thomas Mann is notorious for his lengthy sentences and his never-ending novels, so I picked this as a gentle introduction to his works.
Even just flipping through the short stories will give an impression of how versatile and varied Mann's writing styles could be. Death in Venice, while being his most famous work in this book, is also one of the more difficult ones to read. This was Thomas Mann at his best - his sentences, long and tortuous, rolls through the imagination paragraphs at a time. Felix Krull, on the other hand, is short and succinct, with almost a feel of modern satire permeating through it.
The translation reads pretty clean and straightforward. While this probably probably loses a bit of feel in terms of grammar and structure of the sentences, Mann's styles and the suitability of the German language to this task means that a direct translation would have less flow and may seem cumbersome.
Overall I would say this is a nice illustration of Mann's literary prodigy, without overwhelming those who are not yet initiated into reading his full-sized novels.
Okay.......2005-09-26
The book was shipped really late and that bothered me. I needed it for class, and i got it three weeks from the day i bought it.
Good Introduction to Thomas Mann - Intriguing, Complex Stories.......2005-08-21
The long novels of Thomas Mann can prove challenging, not unlike those of Henry James. Fortunately, this varied collection - Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories - offers an easier way to become acquainted with Mann's intellectual, psychologically complex literature.
Thomas Mann's lengthy sentences and complex grammatical structures markedly complicate the task of translation. H. T. Lowe-Porter's translation is considered the most accessible version, although at the expense of subdividing many of Mann's sentences. (For comparison with an excellent literal version, look at Stanley Appelbaum's translation of Death in Venice, Dover Publications, 1995).
Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories was first published by Vintage Books in 1954. My edition was printed by Vintage International in 1989; it has neither an introduction nor explanatory notes.
Death in Venice (1911): While vacationing in Venice, the aging, highly respected author Gustave Ashenbach becomes mesmerized by a young boy staying at the seashore with his Polish aristocratic family. Although intellectually aware of his growing obsession, Ashenbach is unable to break away. This somber portrayal of a troubled man is a masterpiece of subtle nuances that illustrates Thomas Mann's ability to create layers of meaning.
Tonio Kroger (1903) is perhaps more biographical as it explores a writer's internal conflict between his desire to be accepted, that is to fit in to a bourgeois life, and his contradictory need to follow his artistic temperament wherever it might lead him.
Mario and the Magician (1929) is more explicitly political, depicting in the guise of an unscrupulous hypnotist a Mussolini-like character. The ending of this intriguing account is a surprise.
The setting in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925) is Munich, less than a decade after World War I, amid rampant inflation and social upheaval. The narrator, Professor Cornelius, is saddened by the loss of tradition, exemplified by modern art, music, and dance forms so popular with his older children, now young adults. He finds refuge in his study of history. Early sorrow refers to an incident involving his five year-old daughter, Ellie.
A Man and His Dog (1918) is personal, humorous, and almost idyllic, quite different from the more serious topics addressed in the other stories in this collection.
The Blood of the Walsungs (1905) is the most disturbing story in this collection. The two key characters exhibit an aristocratic arrogance and elitism that culminates in incest. In an opera scene Mann draws a close parallel between his two protagonists and Siegmund and Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure.
Tristan (1902) has been described as a retelling of the legend of Tristan and Isolde set in a sanatorium. Detlev Spinell, a tuberculosis patient staying in the Dr. Leander's medical facility, becomes infatuated with another patient, Herr Kloterjahn's wife. Spinell is a largely unsuccessful writer, one that has difficulty relating to others.
In Felix Krull (1911) the narrator is a self-serving, unscrupulous, amoral, confidence man that is somehow likeable. The story ends abruptly, leaving the reader wondering what happens next. Forty years later Thomas Mann resumed work on this story and in 1954 he published the novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, a light, often hilarious account of a man who wins the favor and love of others by enacting the roles that they desire of him.
Thomas Mann was born in Germany in 1875. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. He left Germany in 1933, living primarily in Switzerland and the United States until his death in 1955.
Entertaining, Classic Literature.......2003-11-09
Thomas Mann wrote "Death in Venice" in 1911. The protagonist, formerly a self-controlled and respectable public figure, gives himself over to obsessively stalking a 14-year-old boy for whom he has erotic feelings. While these feelings would be unacceptable to most people in our era, it is still difficult for us to appreciate the degree of condemnation they would have attracted when this story was written. Yet, Sigmund Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams a decade earlier, and German intellectuals like Thomas Mann were aware that censurable urges lurk beneath conscious notice within all of us. Through this story, the author was surely struggling to come to terms with his own homoerotic urges. Judging from what he wrote, these were deeply troubling to him: corruption, decay, and condemnation are the themes he presents to us. While the images conveyed through this story are repugnant and shocking, the writing is beautiful and affecting.
Several of the other stories in this volume are of similar quality, and similarly deal with troubling themes ("Mario and the Magician," "The Blood of the Walsungs"). Yet, Mann was also capable of an extended and sincerely felt appreciation of the more benign and wholesome aspects of our world ("A Man and His Dog").
These stories are worth reading and re-reading. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929, and these stories, if not Nobel prize quality, at the very least show Mann to be an engaging and entertaining writer.
A Wonderfully Complex Writer.......2003-04-21
Mann is to be struggled with; his work to be attacked and repulsed - it is the embodiment of engaging, challenging fiction. It may be advisable to start out with Mario and the Magician, a splendid and accessible story of a hypnotist performing amazing acts on an incredulous audience that is itself hypnotic in alluring its character audience and the reader into a seeminly pedestrian story that turns out to have a whimsical, fantastic denouement. M&M also doubles as a grand metaphor for the fascism that was beginning to grip Germany - the awesome power of a tyrant and the dangerous nakedness of a raptured audience.
Mann passes the test of great writing, in that even in translation, one can appreciate the literary dexterity of a master at work - a writer carried away, inhabiting each sentence of his story. Some of his lesser stories, towards the end of the anthology, are sprawling introspectives and thoroughgoing accounts of places and things.
Death in Venice is a seminal work and sets the tone for Mann's subtle revelations of repressed passions and the tabboo. Mann elegantly lays bare human souls, yet keeping the lid safely fastened to the pressured jar. One of my favorites was Toni Kroger - a touching story of an artist's life, from young man to mature adult. Mann renders beautifully unrequited love and homosocial admiration by the introverted for the extroverts. In reading his stories, we may find that he expresses memories and feelings that were always there, but could not find the words for before. That, perhaps, is the highest achievement of a writer.
Book Description
Celebrated novella of a middle-aged German writer's tormented passion for a Polish youth met on holiday in Venice, and its tragic consequences. Powerful evocation of the mysterious forces of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, and the isolation of the artist in 20th-century life. New translation and extensive commentary.
Customer Reviews:
Regret Comes From Lack of Self-Awareness.......2006-08-26
Thomas Mann has taken an ages old theme, the attraction of an older, worn out man for a youthful boy, dressed it up in a series of classical allusions, and details how this attraction merely accelerates the decay of the man whose decline began long before he first saw the boy. In DEATH IN VENICE, Gustave von Aschenbach is a German writer living in pre-World War I Europe, who has been trying to balance the struggles involved in maintaining his hard-worn writing laurels with the demands those struggles have placed on his life, his health, and his emotional keel. He has become an ascetic, denying himself the pleasures of the flesh. His muse is a jealous one and demands his attention full time. Over the years, he has willingly paid the price, but the true cost becomes apparent to him only as he turns fifty years of age. He senses a void in his life. He does not know what it is or how to compensate, so he decides that travel in the answer. One of the ironies of Mann's novella is that Aschenbach's readers undoubtedly give him credit for the worldly-wise sophisticate that his many literary works of art suggest he must be. But the truth is that because of his rigorous denial of himself, in terms of maturity and emotional serenity, he is a greenhorn. He tends to view the world as he does through his books, which are laden with an abundance of classical erudition. But the real world is not Plato's Republic reborn. It is a testing ground which favors those whose feet are firmly grounded in the world of the body. Early on, as Mann subtly alludes to Aschenbach's mental and physical infirmities, his fate is a doom foretold.
Aschenbach is puzzled by the continual appearance of a weird looking old man who pops up at convenient moments to glare at him in a puzzling manner. The first time that Aschenbach sees him, he pays him scant attention, but as the visits increase in his trips around Europe, both Aschenbach's and the reader's wonderment grow. After a while, the old man begins to assume allegorical--or at least mystical--proportions. One can almost see a misty haze envelop both during their encounters. It is tempting to treat these visitations as unreal hallucinations of a mind slowly unhinging with Aschenbach seeing a version of himself, following him around Europe, as if to remind him of his looming mortality.
While in Europe, he notices a good looking Polish boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach begins to fantasize about him but dares not do more than just gaze at him from a distance. As if in a rush, the years of ascetic self-denial rupture, opening the door to his latent homosexual tendencies. Mann cleverly avoids calling a spade a spade. Instead he dresses up this fantasy in terms of Aschenbach's limited social background that had been fueled by a lifetime of classical learning. The boy, whose name is Tadziu, is described as a young Adonis, an Apollo, and other such. The only words that pass between then occur at the very end, when Aschenbach sees the boy tormented by bullies and almost, but not quite, intervenes. Aschenbach locks eyes with the boy and in that moment he knows the forbidden joy that, in a different universe might have been his. He dies, possibly of the plague, happy and decidedly ignorant of who he himself really was. Mann passes no moral judgments against Aschenbach. This is no gay bashing novel nor does he hold it up as a trumpeting to engage in illicit activities, but in the ending of what-might-have-been, Mann suggests that life's choices and future happiness might better be served with a clearer moral vision of who we are, what we want, and where we are going.
Gorgeous.......2006-08-20
Mann's masterpiece is an achingly beautiful, exquisitely crafted, spellbinding exploration of beauty, age, love, sex, life, and of course death. I can think of no other book where the setting so effectively establishes the book's atmosphere, so powerfully reinforces its themes and ideas. The plot is so simple, yet wrapped in layers of meaning, both inviting and resisting interpretation.
This book is short yet incredibly rich; it reminds me of a tiny, delicately carved precious jewel. And what a beautiful jewel to dive into and immerse oneself in. Read this book!
Poetic Pedophilia .......2005-11-13
I did not like this book as much as many of the other reviewers. The main problem I had was that I simply could not relate to Aschenbach, the protaganist of the story. I mean, I thought that his obsession with the male child was weird. Unlike Lolita, there was no dark humor in the obsession. There was just a very raw, profound, longing and appreciation for the beauty of the young child. I found that somewhat sick and I cannot say that I've ever had many of the feelings that Aschenbach relates in the work.
Many people seem to think that the most boring part of this book is the part where Aschenbach thinks about his art. Maybe I'm an odd duck, but I actually found this to be the most interesting part of the novella. I like how Aschenbach talks about how he wants to make a name for himself through his art, and about how he wakes up early every morning to pour his soul into his craft. This is the part of the book that I best understood. It really resonated with me.
Even though the story was not my favorite, I must say that I appreciated the author's use of language. The translation I read (by Stanley Applebaum) was lively and captured the author's verbal imagination. I will probably never read this novella again, but I do think that I might like other work by Mann (provided that he is writing about different subject matter!).
I do not know who would really appreciate this book. I guess I would recommend this book largely to people who appreciate art for art's sake, and also to people who like novels which really penetrate the psyche of the main character. Readers less artistically inclined might find this work to be heavy sledding.
Excellent Translation in Dover Edition - Helpful Commentary .......2005-05-30
Death in Venice (1912) is a disturbing story, one that is not easy to forget. It is also exceptional literature, a classic of the twentieth century. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice might be best compared to the subtle, psychologically complex fiction of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In Munich the aging, highly respected author Gustav Aschenbach is in need of change, rest in a new setting, to overcome his growing fatigue that is impacting his writing. While recovering in Venice, Aschenbach slowly, but inexorably, becomes mesmerized by a young Polish boy staying at the seashore with his aristocratic family. Aschenbach is intellectually aware of his growing obsession, but he is seemingly unable to break away. Thomas Mann's somber portrayal of this troubled man is a masterpiece of subtle nuances and psychological intensity.
Thomas Mann's lengthy sentences and complex grammatical structures severely complicate the task of translating Death in Venice. I have read two excellent and yet substantially different translations. The most faithful translation is by Stanley Appelbaum (in this Dover edition, 1995) that tries to be as literal as possible, carefully preserving the comparative length of the original sentences as well as the internal sequence of each original German sentence. Contrastingly, the H. T. Lowe-Porter translation (found elsewhere) is less literal, but is considered the most delightful and readable version, although at the expense of subdividing many of Mann's lengthy sentences. Lowe-Porter's version has been the standard translation for many years.
The Dover edition provides an excellent 10-page commentary, including footnotes.
Zero stars if I could.......2005-01-09
I was a philosophy major in college and I hated this book. But then again, the whole NAMBLA fic genre really doesn't do it for me. I'm sure some literary aesthetes are going to pick this review apart, good for them. I'm incredibly well-read and thought this one was just a tepid bore. Save your time, read some Dostoevsky, some Dickens, some Milton, (...).
Average customer rating:
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A Vintage book
Thomas Mann
Manufacturer: Vintage Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Literature & Fiction
| Subjects
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| Classics
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| Contemporary
| Literary
Mann, Thomas
| ( M )
| Authors, A-Z
| Literature & Fiction
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Gay
| Fiction
| Literature & Fiction
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ASIN: B000874SRG |
Average customer rating:
- Beautiful photography, but not much information . . .
- Great Pictures!
- Wonderfull pictures,great info!
- just great and so informative!
- Pretty good
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Frogs, Toads, and Treefrogs (Complete Pet Owner's Manuals)
Richard Bartlett
Manufacturer: Barron's Educational Series
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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General | Animal Care & Pets | Home & Garden | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Reptiles & Amphibians | Animal Care & Pets | Home & Garden | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
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General | Animals | Biological Sciences | Science | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Reptiles & Amphibians | Animals | Biological Sciences | Science | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
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Pet Supplies | Categories | Home & Garden | Birds | Cats | Dogs | Fish & Aquatic Pets | Insects & Spiders | Reptiles & Amphibians | Small Animals | Other Pets
Pet Supplies (12923371) | Refinements | Home & Garden | Color (color_map) | Flavor (feature_browse-bin) | Food Format (feature_two_browse-bin) | Leash Length (size_browse-bin) | Material (material_browse)
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Frogs and Toads: An Owner's Guide to a Happy Healthy Pet
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Frogs and Toads As a New Pet (As a New Pet Series)
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Care and Breeding of Popular Tree Frogs: A Practical Manual for the Serious Hobbyist (General Care and Maintenance of Series)
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Terrarium and Cage Construction and Care
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Poison Dart Frogs (Reptile and Amphibian Keeper's Guide)
ASIN: 0812091566 |
Product Description
This manual includes detailed instructions for maintaining a proper terrarium, taking preventative measures against parasites and disease, ensuring a healthful diet for your amphibians, profiles of popular species, and more. Paperback / 104 Pages / 6 1/2 x 7 7/8 / 1996
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful photography, but not much information . . ........2001-05-01
This book did a good job of telling about the different families of anurans, but there was very little practical information for the first time frog keeper. It isn't too bad of an investment, though, if you are trying to figure out what kind of frog you have.
Great Pictures!.......2000-03-29
This is a good picture book which the kids just love to look at over and over. It is also fairly comprehensive on the "how-to's" of raising all kinds of frogs.
Wonderfull pictures,great info!.......2000-01-05
This is a nice soft cover book my 12 year old loves it. It it easy for kids and adults to understand. Lots of great pictures and overall information!Its a very popular book I sell on my we page "Frogs and Amphibians". I own and use this book.it Covers many types of frogs and toads.
just great and so informative!.......1999-09-04
this book ofers hundreds of species and the care and maitnence of each one. overall will help you learn how to properly treat your frogs!
Pretty good.......1999-07-08
This is overall an exellent book. I do not think I agree with all the cage sizes Mr Bartlett states. Some of the one he reccomeds are larger than what most do. Still, if your a newbie, I would reccomend this book.
Book Description
Harry Silver has already had a lifetime of trouble from ordinary Berserkersr, the automated killing machines programmed an age ago to denude the galaxy of life. Now when his own family is kidnapped, he faces a deviant machine, a good fit for some or all of the Galactic Dictionary's definitions of ROGUE: ROGUE: (1) A deceitful, double-dealing evildoer .. . (4) A fierce elephant or stamodont that has been banished from the herd . . . (10) Having a peculiarly malevolent or unstable nature . . . (11) No longer loyal, affiliated, or recognized, and hence not governable or accountable . . . erring, apostate. - Galactic Dictionary of the Common Tongue Ordinary Berserkers armed with weapons powerful enough to kill an entire planet were enough of a nightmare. What worse deviltry will a killing machine gone rogue attempt-and even if Silver can stop it, will he ever see his family alive again?
Customer Reviews:
berserker fan - long starving now somewhat full.......2007-09-25
I've suffered through some mighty weak berserker novels since first discovering Mr. Saberhagen back in 1980. This novel is certainly the best in quite some time. Nevertheless its just 3 out of 5. I guess I have always preferred his Berserker short stories to the full length novels.
I also liked Ardnehs sword, which was a recent addtion to the Empire of The East and the Swords stories. These two series have all been worthy books in novel length form and don't suffer from their length like the Berserker series. Between these two novels (Ardneh and Rogue) I now have some hope that Fred still has something to say in novel form.
Decent and Modern Berserker Story.......2006-09-12
Rogue Berserker (2005) is a Better-Than-Average Berserker tale. While we aren't presented with any really new kinds of technology in this book - there are a couple of twists on how technology is used/misused by the humans and their evil machine (Berserker) enemies, which are fairly interesting... for example, both the humans and berserkers resort to disection and experimentation on captured prisoners - of course, it is OK that we do it, because the berserker are "evil machines who can't fell anything, and who are out to exterminate life from the Galaxy".
Harry Silver is the hero of the story, but he is not a very likeable guy... and when his family gets kidnapped, he becomes even more surly, yet obsessed to "get even" with the berserkers who are evidently behind the disappearnce of his family.
Another interesting plot twist are the actions/adventures of the female android, used by one of the antogonists in the tale... she provides an interesting side-story throughout the book, and in the end, winds up having to make some interesting decisions.
The story rates 3.5 stars (rounded up to 4).
Mixed Feelings.......2006-06-25
First of all, it's "Rogue Berserker", not "Rougue Berserker", as titled above. Hopefully, Amazon will change that.
I am starting to think that I need to re-read some of the earlier Saberhagen books to see if they were really as good as I remember.
I hadn't bought any of his books since starting the "Book of Gods" series several years ago. Those books were so poorly written that I couldn't make it through the series and I haven't really looked for any more of his books since then.
In advance of a trip I was making this week, I visited a local book store and saw "Rogue Berserker", which I purchased, having been a fan of the series from years ago. The book started off with a bang, flowed into some fairly minor character development, set up the plot for the book and then resolved the story with rushed action scenes.
As with the Gods series, there are long passages that say the same things over and over, there are paragraphs that seem totally out of place, and there are characters introduced, seemingly for some purpose that is never resolved. A huge, "impressive" rescue effort is mentioned towards the beginning of the book, which turns out to consist of only a few people, none of which turn out to be that impressive. And unless a character has a reason to be young or old, they are all described to be of "indeterminate age", a phrase used more in this book than in all of the other books I have ever read. Combined.
All that said, the story line was creative, there were some really good plot twists and the action sequences were good, if a little bit rushed. At 370 pages, there is plenty of room to flesh out the characters better, build up a better supporting cast and resolve some the story lines - if Saberhagen would just tighten up the repetitive sequences and drop some of the clichéd phrases.
Tightly written, full of the unexpected.......2005-03-03
This novel is more tightly written than some of Saberhagen's other Berserker novels -- more concise and faster moving. The plotting is really skillful. Under the experienced pen of the author, the plot of this book "turns around" to bite the reader in an almost shocking way.
Saberhagen "sets up" the reader from the first page with lots of scattered evidence that is subject to lots of interpretation. The bare facts are these: women and children have been kidnapped by the berserkers. As Harry Winston and his boss Winston Cheng puzzle over the evidence, weighing facts against facts, they work out a pretty sound theory of what has happened and why. Using their assumptions, Harry and Cheng assemble a team and devise a plan to rescue the hostages. The whole rescue mission, which is at the center of the book, is based upon this reconstruction of what really happened. Who did the kidnappings? Why? What will become of the hostages? Where were they taken?
In this respect, the novel takes on some of the suspense of a good mystery novel. And yet the author wisely plants some seeds of doubt. Harry Silver's logic wars with his instincts. "That HAS to be what happened . . . but it somehow doesn't 'smell' right." Have Harry and Cheng built a house of cards?
A blur of shocking and violent events bursts upon the reader at the end of Chapter 12 -- about two-thirds of the way through the book. As Lawrence Durrell once put it, "take but a step to the east or the west and the entire picture changes." It turns out that every key assumption of Silver and Chang was WRONG.
As weapons blaze, as his friends are dying, and as his installation is being blown apart, Harry realizes with a kind of horror that his whole picture -- everything -- was based on wrong interpretations. Some of his brothers in arms, on whom he was depending, turn out to be arch-villains, and the berserkers whom he thought he understood are acting in inexplicable ways, beyond anything Harry could have expected. Furthermore, the hostages are not where everyone assumed they were. The kidnappers are not the ones that everyone "knew" were guilty. Lastly, characters who up until now have seemed inconsequential and even silly suddenly become key and central players in the novel.
The author has managed all of this so skillfully. The plotting is almost brilliant. It is like one of those "gestalt" drawings where a picture seems to change from a lady's hat to a duck. The author takes the same evidence and lays it out in a different pattern. And, suddenly everything is up for grabs.
Harry improvises, recruiting the most improbable allies, making it up as he goes along.
When he blasts his way finally into the fortress and releases the hostages, one of them says, "where are all the others? The other rescuers?" Harry said, "I'm it. There's no one else. I'm the only one that's still alive." What a story!
The characters are marvelous. The book is full of robots or androids of one type or another, and a number of interesting human characters as well. Even though "we all know" that berserkers are unreflective killing machines, you will be surprised to find a few in this book who behave in the most extraordinary ways, reinterpreting their prime directive to make the most aberrant actions seem "logical." Motivation of these berserkers is crafted as skillfully as in Issac Asimov's masterpiece "The Naked Sun."
Saberhagen sometimes evokes Asimov. Asimov's robots relied upon their 'positronic' brains. Saberhagen's rely on their 'optelectronic' brains. Both Asimov and Saberhagen have so much fun warping and parsing their robotic "prime directives." The reader thinks, "robots can't act that way." but -- they can! They do! Because they think in their OWN eerie way!
Heck-- just READ IT. It's about as good as a shoot-em-up space novel is ever going to get.
action-packed Berserker thriller.......2005-01-28
Harry Silver, with a wife and as a new father, needs money, but a Berserker destroyed his vessel. Wealthy Winston Cheng offers him a small fortune along with a quality ship in exchange for Harry leading a private army to rescue his granddaughter and great-grandson kidnapped by a Berserker. Harry knows that if these killing machines allow a "Goodlife" to live it is only because they become subservient. Winston feels this abduction is different because the death machine is a rogue who acts dissimilar from the others. Still Harry says no as he has two reasons to live.
However, Harry learns that the rogue Berserker kidnapped his wife and son. His only hope to save his beloved Becky and Ethan, assuming they have not been terminated as "Badlife" and that Cheng's theory is correct, is the deal. Harry meets old friends, several enemies, and other adventurers while preparing for an assault. Though Winston's strategy seems logical, Harry knows from first hand experience that the best laid plans of Silver always goes astray when confronting a Berserker so why should this quest be any different especially when another machine seeks to kill Cheng's crew.
ROGUE BERSERKER is a throwback tale to the earlier novels with Berserkers in the forefront leading to non-stop action. Harry seems more complete as he seeks vengeance, prays for a miracle expecting none, and accepts any means is fine as long as he rescues his family. Fueled by anger and helplessness, his obsession makes him less ethical yet more human than hero. Fred Saberhagen provides a terrific entry in his long running series as he returns to the basics: human vs. invincible killing machine within a tense story line.
Harriet Klausner
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